Help us Research Your Orientation Skills - Take Our Online Tests and Our Online Training Program

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Help us Research Your Orientation Skills - Take Our Online Tests and Our Online Training Program

Thank you for your interest in our online platform. We provide an online assessment that evaluates a variety of spatial orientation skills, and an online training program that aims at improving them.

For the online assessment, we have a new generation of online tasks available for the public to use that we have recently developed. These tasks are made up of two parts. The first part consists of a consent form and a series of questionnaires, and the second part consists of a set of downloadable interactive tasks. You do not need to complete all the tasks at once, your progress is saved at the end of each task.

After you have taken our online tests, you will have access to our training program, which consists of a task in which you will practice how to reach different locations within a virtual (video game like) town. Locations are identified with different environmental landmarks, and practice increases in difficulty as landmarks become more distant from one another. The training program simulates the developemnt of orientation and navigational skills as it occurs in children.

The interactive tests and training program require you to download and unzip/extract a program to your desktop, and require an active internet connection to record your progress. If you experience any difficulties acquiring or using the tasks, you can email us for assistance at help@gettinglost.ca. In your email, please detail the problem so we can help resolve it as quickly as possible.

Currently, the following interactive online tests are available on the platform:

The Cambridge Face Memory Task - This task requires you to memorize and recall the faces of six individuals. Our collaborators have identified that there is a tendency for individuals with prosopagnosia (the inability to recognize faces) to also experience topographical disorientation (more information here). We included this task to further gather data on the relationship between understanding faces and understanding places.

The Landmark Evaluation Task - This task requires you to view pictures of objects, and rate their size and permanence. We included this task to collect more data on the relationship between navigational ability and an the subjective evaluation of landmarks. The stimuli for this task were generously provided by Dr. Eleanore Maguire and Dr. Stephen Auger.

The Spatial Configuration Task - This newly-developed task involves generating a mental representation of the positions of five objects in a simple space-like virtual environment. This task was included as one of our primary measures of spatial ability. You can watch a tutorial video demonstrating this task here.

The Mental Rotation Task - This classic spatial task requires you to compare two objects, and indicate if they are identical objects, or mirrored-versions of each other. You can read more about similar tasks here.

The Four Mountains Task - This task requires you to memorize an virtual arrangement of four mountains, and then recognize the same mountain arrangement, only from a different perspective and different weather conditions. This task was inspired by the task of the same name originally developed by Dr. Tom Hartley.

The testing platform provides feedback for the Four Mountains Task, the Mental Rotation Task, The Spatial Configuration Task, and The Cambridge Face Memory Task. After completing these tasks, you can view your scores and feedback on gettinglost.ca/testplatform.

Known Issues:
- Some users are reporting the Four Mountains Task will not start on OSX. We are working on fixing this issue. Update Feb 12, 2018: potential fix has been made. Please email us (help@gettinglost.ca) if you have technical difficulties.

Troubleshooting common problems:- Can't open the app on Mac OSX because of your security settings? Here is an article on how to open an app from an unidentified developer.
- Please email us at help@gettinglost.ca if you require technical assistance.